Forum Discussion

Kathleen_HW's avatar
Kathleen_HW
Level 3
11 years ago

Excluding Pagefile.sys in VM snapshots - NetBackup 7.5

I've read a lot of the discussions about excluding drives from vmware backups and using the advanced options.  I have little twist to my issue. I want to backup everything except the pagefile in m...
7.5
Backing Up
Backup and Recovery
NetBackup
Tip-How to
Virtualization
Windows Server (2003-2008)
  • Kathleen_HW's avatar
    Kathleen_HW
    10 years ago

    Found the solution!  Independent, persistent mode drives will be skipped by the snapshot backup.  So for us, because we have our pagefile on a dedicated drive, we changed that drive to be independent persistent mode.  It is automatically skipped!

     

INT_RND's avatar
INT_RND
Level 6
11 years ago

Policy type VMWARE  uses the built-in snapshot functionality of VMWare. It is a complete disk image. The options to exlude the boot disk or data disk are not granular. This is a limitation of the VMWare API. If you exclude the boot disk you are not getting an image of the whole "C:\" drive. If you exclude data disks you are only getting the image of the "C:\" drive.

Workarounds:

1. You could install the Netbackup client and perform a normal Windows file level backup.

2. You could remove the swapfile. (Microsoft advises against this)

 

About the Exclude disk options for Virtual disk selection:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO71006